Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, West -- Description and travel; Congo River -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Africa, West
About noon appeared Chico Furano, son of the late Chico de Ouro,
in his quality of "English linguister;" a low position to which
want of "savvy" has reduced him. His studies of our tongue are
represented by an eternal "Yes!" his wits by the negative; he
boasts of knowing how to "tratar com o branco" and, declining to
bargain, he robs double. He is a short, small, dark man with
mountaineer legs, a frightful psora, and an inveterate habit of
drink. He saluted his superior, Nelongo, with immense ceremony,
dating probably from the palmy times of the Mwani-Congo. Equals
squat before one another, and shaking hands crosswise clap palms.
Chico Furano kneels, places both "ferients" upon the earth and
touches his nose-tip; he then traces three ground-crosses with
the Jovian finger; again touches his nose; beats his "volæ" on
the dust, and draws them along the cheeks; then he bends down,
applying firstly the right, secondly the left face side, and
lastly the palms and dorsa of the hands to mother earth. Both
superior and inferior end with the Sakila or batta-palmas,[FN#26]
three bouts of three claps in the best of time separated by the
shortest of pauses, and lastly a "tiger" of four claps. The
ceremony is more elaborate than the "wallowings" and dust-
shovellings described by Ibn Batuta at the Asiatic courts, by
Jobson at Tenda,by Chapperton at Oyo,by Denham amongst the
Mesgows, and by travellers to Dahome and to the Cazembe. Yet the
system is virtually the same in these distant kingdoms, which do
not know one another's names.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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